


A Me without You

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: WTFock | Skam (Belgium)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Humor, Heart-to-Heart, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Light Angst, M/M, Trauma, my boys are learning how to communicate, neither robbe nor sander is very okay yet about the homophobic attack and they have to talk about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24705163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “We can’t be afraid forever,” Sander asserts quietly. Speaking almost to his knees, or to the strip of piping along the edge of the sofa. “If we want to go back to all the places that were special to us...well. Some of the stuff we talked about during our date at that bar--I think about it a lot. Some of the best moments of ours together.”Robbe slips the arm out from underneath his head and lays it across his eyes. The artificial blindness helps him with the vulnerability, the wounds he’s about to prod with his next words.“I don’t really care,” he says. “I mean. I can’t care as much about that, when--when I can’t even take a walk down that street anymore, and I go the long way round because I look at the bookstore on the corner and I remember, Irememberand--” Robbe reminds himself, almost automatically, to breathe.“Baby,” Sander whispers. “Baby, look at me.”--Canon-divergent extension of season 3 where Robbe and Sander are quarantined through lockdown together and they finally learn to address the homophobic attack on them back at the bar. Feelings are spilled, and Sander reveals the real reason why he acted so nonchalantly the next morning.
Relationships: Sander Driesen/Robbe IJzermans
Comments: 33
Kudos: 117





	A Me without You

**Author's Note:**

> *yodels from my quarantined end of the world* hallooooo! I'm not new to the SKAM fandom by a long shot (since I've watched the OG Norwegian show and the España remake and have been writing for SKAM France for a while) but I am brand spanking new to the Belgian corner of this fandom!! Robbe and Sander officially own my heart and I think the Belgian remake takes the crown imo for best remake ever. I just really, really wanted to have a face-to-face heart-to-heart between the boys about the attack at the bar, though, so here's me remixing the wtFockDown clip of their conversation and reimagining it as if Robbe and Sander were living together at the time they finally address their trauma.
> 
> Inspired by prompt 22 from [this drabble prompt challenge](https://theoceanismyinkwell.tumblr.com/post/189721940158/drabble-challenge-1-150): "You can scream if you want."
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: ["The Wreck of Our Hearts" by Sleeping Wolf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsNm54UwWWQ)

**Donderdag 22:31**

Thursday night in on the first week of quarantine finds Robbe and Sander curled up in one of their favorite positions in the living room, Sander cross-legged on the carpet with a sketchpad and charcoal in his lap, and Robbe on the edge of the couch with his knees bracketing his boyfriend and his arms looped across the other boy’s chest. They breathe together in silence, Robbe blinking slowly in the dimness of the fairy lights that Zoë still left up around the place.

“You missed a spot,” he mumbles after what could have been a moment or a slice of eternity. 

Sander’s hair rustles and tickles under Robbe’s cheek as he turns his head inquisitively. Robbe points a lazy finger at the center of the sketchpad.

“That’s your eye,” Sander says with an aborted chuckle.

“I know,” says Robbe. “And I’d like to have two when you’re done with that.”

“So testy,” Sander murmurs, craning his neck up, chasing a kiss that Robbe playfully dodges. “Don’t you think you’re beautiful even as a cyclops?”

Robbe rolls him a look. Sander could recognize that look anywhere, even upside down in the dimness of the apartment and the roll of dark and uncertain clouds outside. He waits a second, another half more, and that ever familiar shit-eating little grin plays on Robbe’s lips. Even when Robbe’s face is overcast by the grayest of shadows, Sander knows that smile is lurking, sometimes heavy, sometimes ironic, but most times genuine and unbridled and unable to be contained. He’s memorized those smile lines at the corners of Robbe’s face--sketched them, shaded them over and over again into his dozens, hundreds of drawings of the boy, and yet he could never tire of looking at the real thing in front of his own two eyes.

Robbe still attempts a pout, to no avail. The mirth in his eyes outshines everything. “Listen. _Listen_. I can’t take your exquisite shading seriously when my face has got a huge hole in the middle of it.”

“Ah, ah, but--I’m saving the best for last,” Sander says in English.

“But you already did the other one?”

“An artist,” says Sander primly, “always starts with the part of the image that grounds him most. And I--I always end with the part I like best.” He picks up his shortest piece of charcoal and grazes it over the surface of the paper, smudging it with his thumb. A few strokes of his skin, and the shading underneath Robbe’s cheekbone is complete.

Robbe runs his fingers along the line of Sander’s jaw as he lets those words sink in. He moves one palm upward and presses it lightly over his boyfriend’s forehead. Warm, textured. Real. “Knew I was right when I took you for an eye-fucker.”

Sander lets out the most inelegant of snorts. “The mouth on you.”

Robbe raises a brow in challenge, even knowing Sander cannot see it. “What? I can’t say fuck?”

Sander shakes his head. Grins and goes on shading. “Nope. Not legally.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck?” Robbe rubs his own chin in a mimicry of musing. “ _Fuck_. Shit, for variety. Fuck!”

Sander’s shoulders are shaking now with his laugh. “No. _No_. You’re a _baby_. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”

“Fuck you, we’re practically the same age.”

“You were born after the turn of the century,” Sander informs him snobbily. 

“Yeah, and yet I’m the one who knows you’re supposed to draw Robbe Ijzermans with two eyes, not one,” the other boy retorts.

“I’m taking you out the instant this lockdown is over. Get all that youthful energy out of you.”

“Sure, Sinterklaas.”

“I distinctly remember you kissing Sinterklaas.”

“Because you’re a creep,” Robbe says with a beatific smile. He cocks his head downward and to the side to bop his nose against the tuft of washed-out silver hair at Sander’s temple. He presses his open mouth to the skin there, in little circles. Sinks his hands into the locks at the crown of Sander’s head.

“Maybe it was a little creepy,” Sander concedes, “especially for anyone who might have seen us. I promise no more beards and wigs next time we’re out.”

“And no more splurging,” Robbe agrees solemnly.

“I have my commissions, baby. That big one from the girl in Germany is so going to cover our next date.”

“It could cover the next three if we’re careful,” Robbe cautions him.

“Jeez, I was wrong, _you’re_ the old man out of us two,” Sander grumbles. “Anymore budgeting tips for me, poppa?”

Robbe pretends to consider that for a minute, ignoring the mocking glint in the pool-green shine of Sander’s eyes trained on him. “Hm. Just one. We’re going for proper croques for our first date after, and we’re gonna spend an afternoon by the mural.”

Sander’s lips stretch upward into a proper and impossibly wide smile. Robbe resists the urge to rub the little freckle on his cheek where it meets Sander’s smile line.

“Yeah? And then where else?”

Robbe shrugs. “I’m always in the mood for swimming.”

“ _Be gay, do crimes_ ,” Sander singsongs in English. And then in Dutch: “Visiting the monuments of our love, are we?”

Robbe tilts sideways until his entire torso is lying on the couch so he can look at his boyfriend better. Sander pokes the side of his knee incessantly until Robbe lifts his legs too and curls them more comfortably under the couch cushions. Sander himself turns to the side to face Robbe more clearly. This time it’s his turn to run the pad of his finger down the crooked line of Robbe’s nose, across his open lips and down his pointy chin.

“Yeah,” Robbe says softly. “Sometimes I lie awake remembering them. But all I remember is the feeling--and nothing about the surroundings. And I’m just, I don’t know, curious. What it’s gonna be like if we stand there in the daylight, knowing now what we know now.”

“About us ending up together?”

Robbe nods. His hair rustles against his arm tucked under his head.

“I think about that night a lot, too,” Sander admits. “How I saw you and Noor through the glass, and my heart started up like a drum set, but you were fighting with her and I couldn’t hear what you were saying but--” He sets the sketchpad down on the carpet momentarily and rubs the end of his nose with his wrist. “I had the most intense flash of happiness. Selfish happiness. That for a moment, things weren’t working out between you two.”

Robbe searches deep within himself for a reaction to that and finds he doesn’t mind a thing that Sander just said.

“I’d like that,” Sander goes on, in clear reference to Robbe’s previous point. “Go back to the places where we--where we _were_. Just take a walk. Maybe film ‘post-lockdown vlogs’ or something.”

“You mean, us being sappy,” says Robbe.

“Us being sappy,” the other boy confirms.

“You’re better at that. The whole--filming and narrating thing. So I’ll leave you to it.”

Sander assures him, “It’s nothing fancy, just us walking and talking. More for us than for anyone else.”

Robbe passes the back of his hand over his eyes. He can’t quite piece together why that last thing Sander uttered is tugging in his chest, equal parts hopeful and in mourning.

“And I’ll spare you the side effects of my _expert_ cooking,” Sander continues with a crooked little smile. “We’ll go to a café. Get real food. Maybe stop by a bar--that bar we went to last? Liked the ambience. We can try again.”

An arrow of tenseness shoots through Robbe’s bones. He lies still, very still, as the cold quickly creeps up from his feet to his knees. Unconsciously he shifts his arm down to hold himself around his middle.

Sander lays his cheek against the space of couch by Robbe’s torso and pushes the top of his head into the other boy’s stomach. “What’s wrong, baby?”

“You know what’s wrong,” Robbe says. Wooden. “I don’t--do we have to? There are so many bars around. Jens was just telling me about this new place by the--by the…” He knuckles at his brow and words fail him.

Sander lowers his gaze. His lashes flutter for a moment. “We can’t be afraid forever,” he asserts quietly. Speaking almost to his knees, or to the strip of piping along the edge of the sofa. “If we want to go back to all the places that were special to us...well. Some of the stuff we talked about during our date at that bar--I think about it a lot. Some of the best moments of ours together.”

Robbe slips the arm out from underneath his head and lays it across his eyes. The artificial blindness helps him with the vulnerability, the wounds he’s about to prod with his next words.

“I don’t really care,” he says. “I mean. I can’t care as much about that, when--when I can’t even take a walk down that street anymore, and I go the long way round because I look at the bookstore on the corner and I remember, I _remember_ and--” Robbe reminds himself, almost automatically, to breathe. He can nearly hear Milan’s voice in his ear walking him through the breathing exercises.

“Baby,” Sander whispers. “Baby, look at me.”

Robbe shakes his head. His boyfriend’s fingers circle his wrist, begging him to uncover his eyes. Finally Robbe relents, and his eyes flit for the briefest of moments to meet Sander’s, but the guilt and understanding there is too scorching, and Robbe needs to simmer in his own feelings for a moment before he drowns in the wave of forgiveness he never knew until now that his heart was demanding. 

And so he fixes his gaze on the ceiling for the next several seconds as he speaks, low and gravelly, “I didn’t know what to think when we talked on the phone the next morning. If you were--actually--actually okay with everything happening, and if I could love you like that, and if there was something wrong with me for freaking out about it all.”

Sander’s swallow is audible. He seems to draw in a breath to speak, but Robbe goes on.

“I was angry when you kissed Britt, yes, but...I felt lost when you picked up the phone and I asked you if we could report it and you said…” 

Robbe licks his lips. Sander bows his head and thumbs the back of his own neck. Even despite himself, Robbe finds his left hand reaching down to latch onto Sander’s thumb, soothe the bits of charcoal away from the pad of it with small circling motions.

“I’m sorry,” Sander says after a long time.

“I believe you,” Robbe says, of all things.

“We could report it. I’d be with you, a hundred percent,” Sander says.

And once again, Robbe believes him wholeheartedly. He believes Sander now. But--“That’s not the point. I--I just. Wondered how you could be _okay_ with it all.”

That spurs Sander to grab harder onto the hand Robbe has on the back of his neck, and to intertwine their fingers with clumsiness, but determination all the same, as they have always been predestined to be.

“I wasn’t. Okay with it, that is.”

“But you seemed so...nonchalant about it.”

“Yeah,” Sander says over a shuddering breath. “Yeah. I--pretend a lot. I _pretended_ a lot, before I met you, and sometimes I still did, after we first met, and habits die hard.” The apology is written in every note of his tone, more clearly than his first _sorry_ could ever express, and Robbe has to shut his eyes again against the pain of it all. “I pretended everything was fine, because I was so--I was so scared that if I freaked out while you were freaking out, that you’d be terrified that this wasn’t worth it. That, that _we_ weren’t worth it, and then I’d lose you.”

“I’m right here.”

“I didn’t know that then.”

Robbe falls silent in assent. Remembrance.

 _Minute by minute. That chill? That’s chill_.

“I didn’t think that back then, and...you were so--I saw you that first night and suddenly you were my everything, and if I lost you, I didn’t know anymore what I’d do with myself.”

“We are worth it,” Robbe whispers. “I knew we were worth it. Nothing like that could have ever changed my mind about us.”

The air shifts as Sander casts a smile into the gathering darkness.

“I wish you didn’t have to be so scared of losing me,” says Robbe, still quiet as ever. “I know what that feeling’s like, because I always felt it, too, right up until--well. When I found you in the studio, I guess. But it’s the worst feeling in the world, and I wish we could undo it all.”

Sander is slow to respond. And then: “Sometimes...on the really bad days...it comes back. And I get so fucking terrified that you aren’t real, and I’ll wake up without you, and I want to scream.”

“You can scream if you want,” Robbe says gently, meaning every sense of the word from this end of the world to the next. “I’m right here.”

Sander turns this time to bury his face fully into the warmth of Robbe’s stomach. Robbe lifts his hand tentatively and settles it on his boyfriend’s white head, ruffling the split ends down to the dark roots coming out.

“I wish I’d been there for you that night,” Sander mumbles into the sudden wetness of Robbe’s shirt. “I wish I’d--stopped acting so tough and all right.”

“You were going through your own shit,” Robbe says. He understands. He forgives. That’s all he’s ever known how to do, after all: the anger and then the softness and the forgetting. “Besides, I have people in my corner. I couldn’t hide shit from Milan even if I tried. He figured it out barely two days later.”

Sander’s arm clenches tighter around Robbe’s middle.

“But you can stop acting tough and all right,” Robbe reminds him. “It doesn’t have to be that way. _We_ don’t have to be tough and all right. We can just--be together.”

The other boy makes little indication of having heard, save the subtle nudge of the tip of his nose into the flesh of Robbe’s stomach.

Robbe changes the swirling pattern of his fingers on Sander’s scalp. “Sander?” he prompts him. “That chill?”

Now Sander moves, and he nods, tightening his grip still around Robbe, and Robbe understands him completely.

“That’s chill.”

Robbe huffs. He smiles. For that’s what Robbe Ijzermans is made of: irresistible smile lines and pain intertwined with arms outreached for happiness. And Sander knows he could learn a thing or two about that. So he lifts his gaze to meet Robbe’s, icy green melting into oaken brown, and he takes a moment to exult in the sunniness slowly returning to his boyfriend’s face as he reiterates: “That’s more than chill.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was just super fun to type out on a lazy Saturday afternoon. It's amazing to see how Robbe and Sander can be characterized so differently from, say, Lucas and Eliott, or Isak and Even, and I couldn't wait to get my feet wet with writing a piece for the Belgian universe of SKAM. That being said, I would _love_ to hear your thoughts on this oneshot!
> 
> I'm also always taking prompts for various fandoms and many different drabble prompt challenges, so if you have an idea or line you'd like me to try my hand at, please don't hesitate to comment it here or shoot me a DM on social media!! Thank you so much for reading <3 -kaleb
> 
> muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> muh insta: kc.barrie
> 
> [my sobbe moodboard on pinterest](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/skam-sobbe/)


End file.
